The Sniper
by CraicRocker
Summary: Rumor had it Avalanche had picked up a sharpshooter. Rumor had it he could shoot like a Turk. But there were only four people still living who could shoot like a Turk, and they, at least, knew better.    Complete.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: I do not own, nor do I profit by, these characters. Final Fantasy VII is the property of Square Enix, and they are good sports for letting me play with their action figures._

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><p>The word trickled out after the Tiny Bronco incident, in between countless rehashings of Avalanche stealing a Shinra plane – and her pilot – from under the President's nose, and Lardass Palmer getting hit by his own truck. Avalanche had picked up a sniper. Not an ammo-happy gun nut like the big Corel guy; a real sharpshooter with a long-barreled pistol. He'd taken out three militiamen from the President's guard – kneecapped them, then shot their cheap GI rifles out of their hands for good measure – from 60 yards. Even managed to shoot out the tires on a couple of Shinra's vehicles, from the wing of a moving plane, under fire.<p>

So it was more or less excusable when the youngest, most excitable militia grunt who'd been wounded in the action _wouldn't shut up _about how it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, and was practically bouncing out of his infirmary bed as he insisted to everyone in earshot that the guy "shot like a Turk, man, just like a Turk, just _cold_, just _mechanical_!" But it did prompt a few wry looks over the Turks' break room table. Only four people still alive shot like a Turk, and as much as they might like to take a shot at Palmer, they were all accounted for that day. _Crazy kid, _they silently commiserated. Half that damage was probably friendly fire; the sniper was just a convenient scapegoat.

Or, as Reno put it, "We'd look like Fuckwits on Parade if we didn't have Avalanche to pin all our fuckups on."

**X**

The sniper wasn't there when the Turks ran into Avalanche again in Wutai. Maybe he'd never been with them; maybe he was just in a different splinter of Strife's band. That bugged the hell out of Reno, because it was one thing the muscle-brained boy scout did _right_ – split the group into smaller task forces, cover more objectives and keep from being recognized. Shinra didn't even have a complete list of the terrorists they were hunting, because it seemed like they never saw the same people twice. That, and Strife apparently recruited more every time he stopped to tie his shoes.

So instead of the sniper, the Turks got to meet a bratty ninja kid who turned out to be a renegade princess – and a materia thief, and jailbait. Which was how Rude and Reno ended up suspending their vacation and forming a truce with Strife and Tifa (which made Rude happy, at least) while they rescued their respective girls from the slimiest kidnapping sleazebag this side of Hell. And then had the added pleasure of throwing him off a cliff to be eaten by his pet raptors.

Hell of a vacation. Hell of a _story_. Reno knew just how he'd tell it to Tseng, too – saved the princess, killed the troll, found the buried treasure (that armour in the Dachao caves was up for grabs, right?), toast of the town…except that he couldn't tell Tseng, because Tseng would want to know about details like why they'd had Avalanche in their sights and let them go, and what they had found out about the Wutaiian black market for Shinra weapons tech. Hell, he'd probably demand a full-length report on revolutionary activity in Wutai's underground, just in retaliation for his staff dragging into work two days late and (in Reno's case) massively hungover.

So it was a great relief when Tseng didn't even ask about their 'vacation,' or why Reno was so hungover, or why Elena acted so quiet since their return, but instead just plunged into the next assignment briefing – standard dirty work, taking care of some reactor-leak victims who might be tempted to take their oh-so-sympathetic story to the press. Rude and Reno would handle that, while Tseng took Elena on a recon tour of some old temple down south. Avalanche was just too damned weird, too much of a circus; it would be good to get back to business as usual, with no superpowered freaks or ninja princesses or mystery snipers who might not even exist.

That rumour about the sharpshooter just itched at him, under his skin. Maybe Reeve's intel would finally get them somewhere. …Reeve and his spying cat-robot.

…The whole thing was a goddamned circus.


	2. Chapter 2

Then everything went straight to hell.

The reports kept pouring in and they got crazier by the hour. Tseng had lost contact, and Avalanche was hunting some ancient mystical weapon. Tseng was _dead (oh god) _and Sephiroth had some kind of doomsday materia. Tseng was alive but critical, and Avalanche had vanished somewhere up north. Sephiroth knew how to find the Promised Land, and the President was planning a power grab for Heaven. Sephiroth was an alien. Sephiroth was an Ancient. Strife was working for Sephiroth all along. Strife was crazy. Strife was dead, Meteor was falling, Sephiroth was locked in an ice fortress, and Avalanche was on death row. The Planet was alive. The Planet was doomed. The Planet was angry.

That was when Reno, sifting through the rising tide of paperwork at Tseng's desk, trying to sort out the conflicting intel, found the file of a former Turk, active thirty years ago, with a note in Tseng's writing – "confer w/ Reeve re: ID of sniper." (It was definitely Tseng's; only Tseng used words like "confer" in post-its to himself.) "Confer with Reeve" it was, and for a timid, ADD stuffed shirt who lived half his life through his robots, Reeve handled it pretty well when Reno kicked in his door.

**X**

"So you found his file?" Reeve kept one eye on the monitors, watching through Cait Sith's camera eyes a scene Reno couldn't see.

"What do you know about it?"

"Tseng showed me before he left for the Temple, so I could compare the photo against Cait Sith's scans of the guy's profile. Strife following him was all part of Tseng's plan, by the way – we spent days planting the clues to lead them to the Keystone while you guys were in Wutai. He's the one who pulled Tseng out of the Temple, you know."

"Strife did?" Reno was having trouble keeping up with Reeve's rapid-fire changes of topic.

"No, Valentine. He used to be a Turk. He pulled Tseng out when the walls started to crumble, right as I went in to find Strife's group. Tseng had Valentine's identity pegged from day one, don't ask me how; maybe because he was always the contact for that Nibelheim facility. He's a cold one, you know."

"Tseng?"

"Valentine. He barely speaks, and when he does, it's …cold. Apathetic. Morbid, usually. But he spent three decades in a coffin, so what can you expect."

"Decades?" Reno echoed. That at least matched the gap in Valentine's timeline, though it made for more questions than answers.

"So he says. That's all I can get out of him, generally – that, and he's out to get Hojo. Some bad blood there, I think it was about a woman. You'd think thirty years underground would cool him off, but Valentine just doesn't let stuff go. He's obsessed. They won't tell me what they found in that basement under the old Shinra mansion – other than Valentine, obviously – but he got more and more withdrawn after that."

"Valentine?"

"Strife. Half of what he says is about Sephiroth, and the other half doesn't mean anything at all. It's more than personal with him; it's some kind of holy war. He's obsessed," Reeve repeated. "So's Valentine."

**X**

Reno came within a moment's hesitation, the next time he was summoned to Junon, of going down to the detention cells where Valentine was held. He only turned back when he realized he had no idea what he would say.


	3. Chapter 3

_Prisoner 31597, of the Avalanche group, positively ID'd as former Administrative Research ("Turks") agent Valentine, reported "missing, presumed dead" _**################################################################# **_years ago. Prisoner remains non-cooperative with questioning concerning his current involvement with a known terrorist cell, **##################################**__ and the background of cell leader Cloud Strife, also reported dead _**#############################################**

Rude flipped the file shut. Reno, from where he'd been reading over Rude's shoulder, fell back on the battered couch, unreadable, staring at nothing. He didn't have to read the blacked-out, burn-after-reading lines – the name and the slow, creepy stare finally fell into place.

"Zack Fair's little sidekick." His voice was slow, distant, wondering.

"He still looks sixteen."

"Wasn't he supposed to have died with Fair?"

"Hmn. Which time?"

"Hah, right." Because they'd died at least twice, hadn't they – officially dead when Hojo took them, then dead for real four years later when they escaped and the army was called in. Except that Strife popped back up again. "Either. Both. Come to that, how did Sephiroth come back? And what the hell is a fossil like Valentine doing, prowling around again after thirty years, looking like he's twenty-five?"

Shrug – _isn't it obvious_. "Mako. Hojo. Maybe that Jenova carcass he keeps cawing about."

"The alien thing? Fuck – you don't think he's putting that _in_ people, somehow?"

"Heard him recording notes once, when I was cleaning up after one of his fuckups. Thing kind of…exploded. Talking about the Jenova cell-carriers, how they were the perfect warriors. Unkillable. Something about the Jenova cells reuniting."

"_Fuck_," said Reno again, with feeling. "You think Strife – maybe Sephiroth –?"

Rude shrugged. "Back from the dead." _That's all I know._

**X**

Reno had been staring at Tseng's snowed-under desk for an hour or more, while the tepid dregs of oversweetened black coffee cooled on the desk and in his veins, hating the answers slowly coming into focus.

Put it all together, and it made a horrible, horrible kind of sense.

Hojo.

That creepy giggling fuck.

Shinra was ruthless and the Turks were sadistic, but Hojo was _wrong_, a kind of wrong that twisted your guts to think about. Reno had killed people, sometimes more painfully than necessary. Shot them, mostly, or knifed them. One he'd strangled with his own tie in the alley behind the casino where he'd been assigned to ferret out a small-arms cartel. Then there was that time with the piano bench… Point being, he never left his targets with more limbs than they were born with, never peeled off their skin and lacquered their naked muscles with molten metal to try to make living armour, never rooted around in their guts cutting and splicing to make them run more efficiently. One of the worst was the wolf infused with half a human cerebral cortex and human vocal cords. The tortured result Hojo dubbed a "failure," and demanded it "cleaned up."

Reno's hands still got cold when he remembered the way it howled right up until he pulled the trigger. Or screamed. Whatever.

He'd heard once that another, more "successful" one had been spotted in the desert prison outside Corel – too consumed with empathy to fight even when it was attacked, to do anything but whine for mercy. He'd always put off going to check it out.

**X**

Rude, Reno, and Elena were all out on assignment the day the President staged the public execution of the Avalanche ringleaders. An unlucky surveillance camera glitch prevented anyone from noticing the mysterious escape of the other prisoners from their cell block. As a skilled technician and trusted agent, Reeve Tuesti dedicated his efforts to tracking down the culprit(s).


	4. Chapter 4

Rude was the first to actually catch a glimpse of Valentine, sniping Shinra guards from the roofs of Rocket Town while Strife, Tifa, and Highwind stormed the rocket just five minutes before it was set to launch its huge materia payload into the meteor. Not that they discussed it at the time; while Rude was babysitting the rocket, Reno was killing time and liver function in a Junon dive, waiting for the call to bring the chopper in, waiting for another by-the-books takedown.

_There comes a point, _Reno reflected into his third (_fifth_) double scotch, _when all your training fails you_. All the protocols, all the mission briefs, all the weird curveballs Tseng could throw you in training exercises – all of it failed. Because you always had a fallback: you had a gun, and if a situation went totally to hell you could shoot the problem until it fell over and died.

These people _didn't die_.

The people they'd been thrown up against – Avalanche on one side, Sephiroth on the other, and Reno couldn't remember which was worse – didn't die, couldn't be killed; they just came back stronger and crazier. Highwind stole Shinra's prize airship. Wallace turned his own body into a weapon. Strife was on his third or fourth resurrection now, and more obsessed with his private holy war than ever, according to Reeve. Valentine was some sort of undead. Sephiroth was practically a god. Shinra and the Turks were seeming less like a third major power in this weird war, and more like a bystander caught in the crossfire. Reno could see them in the amber dregs of his fifth (_eighth_) double – a speck between two rising tides, a footnote to the apocalypse. _I wonder if they'll notice when they blow us off the map._

His phone had to ring three times before it got through to him. It was Rude.

"…They got us."

Reno swore and snarled and almost crushed his phone and gave the order to retreat.

"Brass won't like it." Rude was breathless – must be moving on broken ribs.

"Tell them we're on break." (A private joke; Tseng's Turks are never on break. _Tseng isn't here. _Focus.) Avalanche wanted the rocket? Fine. They already took the Bronco, the Highwind, the submarine; let them have the rocket. Let them ride it straight to hell. Reno hung up, downed his scotch, dialed another number. "Palmer? Rocket's ready. Launch it now." Let the meteor take out Avalanche; maybe Avalanche would take out the meteor, too. Play your enemies against each other. Tseng would have liked it.

_Tseng isn't here._

**X**

The rocket had hit the stratosphere by the time Reno got to the chopper. He was over the Corel mountains when the rocket collided, detonated; when Meteor fractured, fragmented…reformed. Unstoppable. He allowed himself to pound the control panel exactly once, in frustration and fury and _that was our only shot_, before concentrating on finding a landing spot on the outskirts of Rocket Town. Nobody stopped him as he hauled Rude's injured ass off the field. Nobody took their eyes off the sky, though the show was long over.

Easing the bird back into the air, they were just in time to see a flash of red, bringing up the rear of a straggling group running for a twisty, hidden mountain pass. _Riding vanguard_, Tseng would have called it. The flash of gunpowder took out two Kyuvildins before the remnants of Avalanche disappeared into the Nibel mountain caves.

"Is that him?"

Rude didn't have to ask. "It's him," he muttered around a mouthful of bandages he was strapping around his chest. In the mirror, Reno saw the stolen Highwind lifting off from wherever it had been hidden in the shadow of the mountains, banking hard to the west, accelerating out of sight. He let it go. Orders were to retrieve Rude when the job was over.

**X**

The Shinra No.27 rocket's escape pod wasn't part of the original design; it was added by Highwind's engineers late in the building process. The pod's re-entry and water landing went unobserved because Shinra's two orbital satellites were crashed and dismantled when Heidegger got the space program cut, and Reeve was not smug when he told Heidegger that. Not smug at all.

**X**

In the wake of yet another miraculous Avalanche escape, the Shinra brass didn't give them as much grief as Reno would have expected. Rufus' icy annoyance faded easily into the background; Scarlet was too busy creaming her stockings over her new Mako cannon toy, and for once Hojo wasn't even complaining about the impact on his research budget, but actually approved of the idea of firing pure Mako bolts directly at Sephiroth (which probably meant it was automatically a bad idea). Reeve was holding out for Strife to come charging in, swinging his huge sword and his hero complex, still clinging to Tseng's idea that Avalanche were the only ones with the power to take out Sephiroth.

With the speed of irony and petty vengeance, Heidegger ordered the Turks to retrieve the anti-Sephiroth weapons – standard ordinance, super-rare materia, Hojo's biotech – from the derelict Gelnika at the bottom of the ocean – "to keep them out of Avalanche's hands."

_Maybe somebody should have kept them out of our hands._


	5. Chapter 5

Elena stayed behind in the sub to keep a lookout for Emerald Weapon, while Reno and Rude went into the sunken Gelnika plane, the cameras embedded in their shades relaying grainy video back to her monitors. No one was mentioning that the real reason she was out of action was the way her skills had crumbled since Tseng…since Tseng had been taken out.

They had barely cleared the airlock and beaten off the swarm of Hojo's gengineered freaks – floating hydrocephalic things with stinging tentacles – when they ran into Avalanche's latest ops force: Cloud, and the pilot – and Valentine. He was recognizable as the same man from Tseng's file, but just barely. This wasn't a man, it was a ghoul – rail-thin, red-eyed, and paler than a corpse, hollow fires in his half-veiled eyes, the lines of his face dragged and twisted with pain, the metal arm more like a claw than a human hand. Reeve had said Valentine was gunning for Hojo. Reno thought he could guess why.

"Jesus, Valentine, what the hell did he do to you," Reno choked under his breath – then regretted it as Valentine raised his head to look at him. Valentine was breathing hard, and his blood-flecked claw flexed restlessly in the folds of his cloak. Cloud and Highwind stepped forward to flank him, with a shimmer of barrier and regen spells rippling automatically into place around them.

_Oh yeah. We've come a long way since the fight over Sector 7. _

The job. Finish the job. Retrieve the weapons. Reno thumbed the switch on his mag-rod.

"I can't give you what's here. We'll take out Sephiroth."

The whine of his EMR charging up sang along his nerves and drowned out his brain and his hesitations. Beside him, Rude caught the point of Highwind's pike on his bracer, and the world narrowed down to the old familiar rhythm. Strife lunged, missed, letting Reno get up close and personal before Valentine's shot perforated his shoulder; he shook it off in time to watch Rude send Highwind flying with one bare-knuckle uppercut. Damn, Valentine was _fast_, faster than Strife, and Strife was a mako-powered blur of spells and steel; Valentine came at you from every direction, inhuman, mechanical, landing shots in shoulders, calves, that massive claw slicing chunks of flesh away if you got too close and he _never missed. _But – no headshots. No torso shots, though their body armour couldn't stop this caliber of bullets. Nothing lethal._ He could spread our brains across the walls why doesn't he just __**do it **__he's a Turk always take the killshot_

_he's a Turk _

They couldn't take much more and Reno knew it. Rude's left leg wouldn't take his weight and Reno was half-blind from a head wound. Act, react, act, react; the blood in his mouth burned his raw throat with every breath, like inhaling flecks of hot rust, and pain flowered in his shoulder and again in his left side and that was fine, fine, just move faster, and then he saw Valentine doubling over in apparent pain and loyalty be damned, he rammed him with the EMR _hard _–

And then Valentine…melted. That was the only word Reno had. His whole body shuddered and twisted, and something _else_, something _other_, erupted through his flesh. Rude fell back a step, but collected himself again quickly; Reno wasn't so calm, cursing a blue streak as he fumbled at his gear, cranking his EMR up to full power and groping for barrier spells.

He'd forgotten the camera in his shades until Elena's scream through the mike threatened to pop his eardrums and he realized she could see this lurching, groaning thing too – sinews cracking, bones snapping and reforming, skin twisting and sloughing into a hard carapace over his face, like a shell, or a mask; and the clawed metal hand bristling with tiny blades that ratcheted out like...a chainsaw. _It turned into a fucking chainsaw_.

It was all over from there. Strife and Highwind battered them with fire and ice spells from the sidelines while that ...thing, that mask of hell that Valentine had become tore shreds from their flesh. Finally the pilot hit Rude's broken ribs again, hard, and he withdrew with a strangled grunt of pain. Reno followed moments later, supporting Rude against his shoulder as soon as they were out of sight, all the way back to the waiting transport.

Elena kept up a shaking litany of "what _was_ that how did he _do_ that turned _into_ it what the _hell_ some kind of _demon_ how did he _do that?_" all the way back to the Junon port. Reno, who had been assigned more than once to deal with the wreckage pulled out of Hojo's lab when he was through with it, gritted his teeth and said nothing. This had Hojo's stamp all over it.

Valentine was a Turk.

He'd see Hojo dead before the meteor fell.


	6. Chapter 6

Shoulder to shoulder in front of the window of the president's office, Reno stood with Rude and Rufus – rank forgotten for now as they looked on toward the eastern shore – watching tiny figures dart around the colossal bulk of Diamond Weapon, holding it back from the city.

"Why are they fighting the Weapon?" Rude spoke up, unexpectedly. "They want to see Shinra brought down. No problem with civilian deaths. Why stop it attacking Midgar?"

Reno half-shrugged. "Bunch of psychos, they'll fight anything. Reeve said they already took out the Weapon that was flying around over Junon. Damn, look at 'em go!" he exulted. "Why are we fighting these guys? We should hire them!"

"We did. At least, some of them." Rufus' voice was soft, unreadable, but one corner of his mouth quirked ironically as he watched a flashing broadsword, the swirl of a red cape, an airship circling overhead with its missile bay doors opening for another salvo. "Given the way things turned out, I don't think they'd appreciate a second job offer. In fact, I don't think we want to turn up on their radar at all."

He turned to face them. "Consider that an order. Effective immediately, Shinra is disappearing from this conflict. Let Avalanche and Sephiroth annihilate each other – maybe while they're doing that, we can figure out a way to survive the meteor. But _do not engage_ unless they target us first."

The intercom chirped on Rufus' desk. "_Mr. President, preparations for Sister Ray are now in order,_" Heidegger announced.

Rufus glanced out the window again, at the retreating Weapon, and beyond to where Sephiroth's cave lay waiting in the north. "But maybe," he murmured, "we can give them a little edge." He moved toward the intercom. "You two – report to Heidegger downstairs. Start reviewing our options to evacuate people to shelter. If we don't have enough shelters, build some." The last thing Rude and Reno heard him say, as they headed for the door, was "…Fire."

**X**

They joined Heidegger on the cannon's observation desk, just in time to see Weapon's final barrage headed straight for the top of Shinra Tower. Straight for Rufus.


	7. Chapter 7

Tseng could have stopped it. Tseng was always the thin blue line between Rufus and Heidegger, holding Heidegger back with sheer cold intimidation. But Tseng was deep in a coma and Rufus was somewhere in thirty floors of rubble, and Heidegger vaulted himself into power faster than you'd have thought he could move. He sent every guard in the city after Avalanche and not one to stop Hojo from nuking the city with its own power grid; he shoved Reeve – the last voice of reason – in a prison cell, and…got into a giant robot? Scarlet had a _giant fucking robot_? (Reno clamped down on questions like _why _and _how _and _what the hell._)

So this was it. The crazy scientist was going to blow up the city. Sephiroth was going to absorb the Planet's energy and become a god. And Shinra's corporate executives were stomping around the Plate in a giant Avalanche-hunting robot.

In a world gone mad, the last Turks left everything but their guns and ran for the border.

**X**

…straight into Avalanche.

Weapons came up on both sides and for a tense minute it looked like it was going to come to one more fight – not helped by Elena's panicky blustering; the kid really didn't know when to stop following orders, even Heidegger's – but Avalanche were slow on the draw, hesitating, obviously on their own mission. So Reeve was right – Cloud was charging in to the rescue. Muscle-brained boy scout.

Glad as he was to see Strife, though, Reno was really looking past him, at a blood-tipped gauntlet and an ancient rifle, swung one-handed like a pistol. _Shoots like a Turk. _Under the tunnel's pulsing red lights Valentine looked like vengeance incarnate, come back from the grave where he'd retreated when the nightmare began….and like he'd never been away, just carrying out a clean-up operation, on hold for 30 years. Ready to deal, as they all did, with the trail of ruined lives and ravaged bodies. Poetic, really. _If anyone was going to take down Hojo…_

Reno pointed back down the tunnel leading into the city. "The cannon's mainframe is in sector 8. Keep to the right all the way down the tunnel. Hojo should be alone." Valentine looked surprised, then nodded once, understanding. There was gore in the articulated joints of his claw.

…_At least it could be one of our own._

The Turks, after all, were always left to clean up in Hojo's wake.

**X**

"The job's over. It's all over."

**X**

They were nearly out of the tunnel when Hojo started shrieking over Elena's radio. Reno was surprised Hojo was lucid enough to think of it. His nasal voice cut through a roar of background noise – screaming evacuees, raid sirens, the whine of the cannon cycling up, and, getting closer, the thunder of a massive pistol that could only be Valentine's. So – it was almost over, then.

"_Where the hell are you? Those witless trolls are practically on top of me! Stop them! They're going to ruin everything, can you even comprehend what is at stake here? What are they paying the Turks for, anyway? Get your worthless carcasses up here and stop them!"_

Reno took the CB from Elena's hand, where she was staring dumbly at it, and thumbed the 'talk' button, cutting Hojo off in mid-screech.

"We're on break."

He dropped the radio in the mud at the mouth of the tunnel, heard with satisfaction but not surprise as it crunched into silence under Rude's heel, and stepped forward into the sunlight.


End file.
